Obrecht's works

It is only too easy to overwork the
mass-as-symphony cliché, but
when discussing Obrecht, such an
orientation is essentially impossible to avoid. For one, Obrecht's
masses have long been recognized as the center of his output.
Further, the few decent recordings
of his music focus on the masses. Even there, until recently, one
could hardly name a good recording of a single mass, and most remain
unrecorded today. This is doubly true for the motets, with most
of Obrecht's (apparently) late motets unavailable on record. While
one should not rely on recordings for
assessment, the nature of music and
our lives today makes such a reliance difficult to avoid. Works
which have been heard in quality performance become that much easier
to grasp and consider in greater detail. It becomes easier to
assign real meaning, as there is
always a danger of assigning deceptive meaning to something other
than the real, audible result of notation. This limitation enforces
a partial picture of Obrecht's masses and motets. To briefly
summarize the remainder of his output, Obrecht seems to have had
little interest in the courtly chanson
genre, leaving mainly secular works of derivative nature or modest
scope, many apparently instrumental in conception. While the latter
are solid miniatures, they do not stand out from many similar works
by contemporaries, and indeed would be unable to sustain a reputation
on their own. They sometimes have the character of rollicking
drinking songs, and so seem to underscore the carefree — or
even irresponsible — nature already ascribed to the composer.

In discussing Obrecht's contrapuntal
style, and his sense of texture & form, we must begin with
his obvious indebtedness to Busnoys and
Ockeghem. Obrecht conspicuously
copied Busnoys' formal scheme in his Missa Petrus apostolus,
and quoted Ockeghem extensively in both the Missa Sicut spina
rosam & Missa De Sancto Donatiano. The latter can
be specifically dated to 1487, and since it uses Ockeghem's style
so literally, it is considered to date prior to Obrecht's own
stylistic breakthrough. However, with the "mature style"
now thought to be established only a couple of years later, there
is little intervening time for what might otherwise be considered
"transitional" masses. The resulting question is obvious:
Are the masses which rely so directly on their models necessarily
earlier, making the more original masses necessarily later? Whereas
this has been a sensible chronological paradigm to some degree, it
is also the case that we have no specific reason to believe that
it is valid. The Bruges endowment of 1487 might have asked Obrecht
to pay specific homage to Ockeghem. One might even suggest that
Obrecht merely felt lazy in the face of a deadline, or that his
interest in mastering earlier styles came only after an initial
outburst of originality (the "outsider" notion). I have
used the word "apparent" many times with regard to suggested
chronologies for Obrecht's "mature style," but such a
suggestion might not be apparent at all. While it is accepted that
Obrecht's motets differ wildly in intention, and consequently
structure, the same may well be true of his masses. The idea that
he might have written such mind-bogglingly original works as Missa
Malheur me bat & Missa Fortuna desperata without any
particular progression is certainly an exciting one. Likewise, the
notion that what seem to us to be the more sophisticated masses in
Josquin's oeuvre are his latest has
also been called into question. Of course, without this
"progress" paradigm, we
are left with no chronological paradigm.

Aside from obvious structural debts to Busnoys (in the areas of
tenor planning & sequential construction) and Ockeghem (in the
areas of sonority & contrapuntal momentum), Obrecht was not
restrictive in his choice of borrowed material. He used melodies
by those composers, and in his masses alone, on top of various
plainchant melodies, borrowed lines from: Agricola, Barbingant,
Barbireau, Binchois or Dufay, Compère, Frye, Hayne, Josquin,
Malcort, as well as several more obscure or anonymous figures.
Obrecht's borrowing was largely restricted to the cantus firmus,
which he sometimes quotes literally and at unprecedented length,
but it would be incorrect to cite Busnoys & Ockeghem as his
only structural influences. In his Missa Caput, he follows
the plan of the English anonymous, and one might also seek parallels
with the style of Regis in the massive sound of many of Obrecht's
presumed early cycles. What Obrecht did not do is engage in real
parody, nor did he forego a cantus firmus more than a few times
(and never in his masses). Given his trend-setting methods in some
areas, it is somewhat surprising that he did not take up these
trends used already by Ockeghem et al. While Obrecht's body of
motets includes five examples in five parts, and even one in six
(a Salve regina, which is not considered stylistically to
be among his later works), his masses include only the Missa Sub
tuum presidium, progressing from three to seven parts. Two or
three are in three parts (and are considered among the "mature"
works), uncharacteristic for his generation, as are three of his
motets. In keeping with questions on chronology, one might perceive
these as part of a deliberate historicizing
trend to Obrecht's work, in sharp distinction to the current
progress-oriented view of his career.

Returning to that "progress"-oriented framework,
Obrecht's development was primarily with the cantus firmus mass,
and in that, he continued specific structural trends, especially
those established by Busnoys. The methodical way in which Obrecht
laid out his cantus firmuses echoes Busnoys, as does his reliance
on scalar figures and syncopation within the modern C mensuration.
However, Obrecht continued to find his own ways to extend lines,
and to emphasize results-based development. In Busnoys' music,
audible form carries momentum, whereas in Obrecht's mature style,
works develop their own momentum without a reliance on the preexisting
cantus firmus progression. Obrecht's masses have a much higher
degree of continuity & seeming "naturalness" in that
sense. I have suggested that Obrecht asks us to perceive the effort
underlying the construction, yet at the same time, he wants to make
it sound effortless. The speed at which Obrecht was said to be
able to compose a mass (in one night) could have contributed to
this sense of continuity, but it also seems to owe a debt to Ockeghem.
However, while Ockeghem's music can be said to simply run out of
steam after a while, and therefore ends, Obrecht's enjoys a sort
of consummation in which the procedures of the work find a sense
of closure. As much as that, what separates Obrecht's (for the
sake of argument) later works from his earlier works is the way in
which he uses reduced scoring passages. They melt seamlessly into
and out of fully scored passages, without a sense that one or the
other is more important in any particular way. Duos had been
important to Dufay, who used them as
a form of tension to extend lines, but Obrecht uses duos as another
type of argument integrated with the whole. He finds other ways
to extend lines, something which he eventually did to an unprecedented
degree in his Missa Maria zart.